Video: Creating a custom brush

Now the mountains are looking snowcapped, but we still have these green trees in the background. We are going to get rid of them with some painting. So let's select the Mountain layer and create a new layer above it. And will name this new layer, creatively enough, Painting. It can be useful to confine your painting to a separate layer so that you can go back later and color correct the base layer. I'm build custom brush to paint the background trees. I create a lot of custom brushes while I'm working, and I would adjust that it's helpful to give your brush a distinctive name, so that you'll remember what it does when you come back to it later.

In this course, well-known author, teacher, and illustrator David Mattingly demonstrates his production-proven matte painting techniques and shows how to turn a summer daytime scene into a wintry nightscape using Photoshop and After Effects. David shows how to take a plate, or a still shot from a film, and alter key elements to change the season and time of day. Using advance digital matte painting methods, David removes all of the greenery from the mountains, fields, and trees, and covers them with snow. Then he replaces the sky, and adds realistic touches such as chimney smoke, icicles, and night-lit windows. In the final chapters, you'll discover how to create an animated scene that cross-dissolves between the two versions.

Creating a custom brush

Now the mountains are looking snowcapped, but we still have these green trees in the background.We are going to get rid of them with some painting.So let's select the Mountain layer and create a new layer above it.And will name this new layer, creatively enough, Painting.It can be useful to confine your painting to a separate layer so that you cango back later and color correct the base layer.I'm build custom brush to paint the background trees.I create a lot of custom brushes while I'm working, and I would adjust that it'shelpful to give your brush a distinctive name, so that you'll remember what itdoes when you come back to it later.

As a starting point for this custom brush, you can use either theChalkBrush from the set of custom brushes included with the coursematerials or use the brush titled Chalk from the default brush set thatships with every copy of Photoshop.Select either of those brushes and then start a new file forsome experimentation.500 pixels x 500 pixels is good.Let's look with this ChalkBrush looks like before we add any variation to it.Make the brush large and then dab it once. You can see it's a very irregularshape, very organic, with no regular edges.

This should work really well for painting the trees.Now we're going to add some dynamics to it to make it a more interesting mark.If we just go ahead and paint with it without any dynamics, it's sort of likepainting with a piece of chalk, as the name implies.Now open up the Brush panel and under Brush Tip Shape, I am going to add somespacing so there's a little bit of distance between each dab of the brush.If I don't do anything else, this creates a brush that looks kind of likeconfetti and not a very interesting mark.

So now let's add some additional dynamics to make it more irregular.Let's click into Transfer and open that up.The opacity is controlled by the Pen Pressure, and I want to set the minimum onthe brush to 30% so I can't make a mark that's lighter than 30% opacity.I also want to add some scattering. This will make each dab go off in a slightlydifferent direction and it's very good for randomizing a stroke.This is really good for making the brush look less patterned.

I would also like the brush to orient slightly differently on each stroke.Right now, you're always seeing the same orientation on the mark.To do that, I'm going to click into Shape Dynamics and I'm going to adjust theSize Jitter and also the Angle Jitter.And then I'll add some Roundness Jitter so that it's even more irregular.Let's test it out in the file.So now you can see the brush is looking very organic and will work really wellfor these trees on a hillside.

So with our custom brush created, let's go ahead and close up the Brush paneland return to our Chalet file to paint the trees.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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